Help Web Visitors Locate You

Location, location, location. It's important in real estate and on your website, too. No matter if you are a catalog business and ship internationally or you only deliver pizza within 10 miles of your restaurant, people want to know who they are dealing with and your location is part of that.

Minimum--location not important

Even if you are a strictly web-based business or believe your customers should not care where you are located, the minimum location information required for any business is a real address on your Contact Us page. Without an address or with just a P.O. Box, people will wonder if you are a legitimate business. Maybe you will take my money and disappear without a trace. If that's not the way you want your prospects to be thinking, include your address on a Contact Us page.

Average--location somewhat important

If your location is significant to your business, for example, if your customer base is in the surrounding geographic area or you expect correspondence by mail, then it's good practice to put your address on every page of your website. Typically, this is in the page footer along with your phone number and email address. Sometimes, all people want when they go to your site is your address. Make it easy for them to find it.

Maximum--location critical

If customers physically travel to your business, abundant location details are critical. You want to provide a map and possibly driving directions so people can find you easily. You can draw your own map if that's all your visitors will need or you can link to a map website, like MapQuest or Yahoo Maps.

Map websites allow you to include your specific address within the link, so visitors click directly to the page showing your location. Visitors can also obtain driving directions at the map site and it's good to mention this as an additional feature. If you use a map website, be sure to verify the page that appears when you click the link--online maps are not always accurate. If yours does not appear correctly, try another map website.

There may actually be companies out there that do not want their location known and have so much money rolling in that they are willing to risk losing business because of it. For the rest of us, helping our customers locate us through our website is just good business.